Many Java developers are now looking at Ruby, and the Ruby on Rails web framework. If you are one of them, this book is your guide. Written by experienced developers who love both Java and Ruby, this book will show you, via detailed comparisons and commentary, how to translate your hard-earned Java knowledge and skills into the world of Ruby and Rails.

If you are a Java programmer, you shouldn't have to start at the very beginning! You already have deep experience with the design issues that inspired Rails, and can use this background to quickly learn Ruby and Rails. But Ruby looks a lot different from Java, and some of those differences support powerful abstractions that Java lacks. We'll be your guides to this new, but not strange, territory.

In each chapter, we build a series of parallel examples to demonstrate some facet of web development. Because the Rails examples sit next to Java examples, you can start this book in the middle, or anywhere else you want. You can use the Java version of the code, plus the analysis, to quickly grok what the Rails version is doing. We have carefully cross-referenced and indexed the book to facilitate jumping around as you need to.

Thanks to your background in Java, this one short book can cover a half-dozen books' worth of ideas: